The functionalist approaches in translation science lay great stress on the principle of cultural embeddedness of the source and the target languages and accordingly view translation as an intercultural transfer. In legal communication based on legal texts, communicative situations are directly affected by the legal systems of the source and target cultures. The legal system of one of the parties involved or, more rarely, a supranational legal system, is generally adopted as the communication framework and thus defines the language to be used. The translatability of legal texts, however, directly depends on the relatedness of the legal systems underlying the translation. The communicating parties therefore need to be well acquainted with the legal system(s) involved. This is especially the case when using English as the language of communication, as the Anglo-American legal system, based essentially on common law, differs substantially from continental law, to which most of European countries belong. The nonequivalence of many legal concepts and terms pertaining to these two systems thus has to be taken into consideration. In this paper, cases of non-equivalence will be illustrated with examples from the terminology used to define different types of system-bound legal professions and court structures, as well as with specific terms referring to particular areas of law, such as company law. The Cultural Embeddedness of Legal Texts

The paper proposes a model for translating legal texts which is intended to direct the translation process through a series of stages to the final product-a skopos-oriented target text in which the potential pitfalls resulting from translating between different legal languages and systems have been considered. The model unites different translation stances (Snell-Hornby's integrated approach, the functionalist views with the skopos theory and the concept of cultureme, as well as Chesterman's theory of memes) with the findings of comparative law regarding differences between legal systems and their impact on legal languages. It consists of ten stages, each addressing one of the specific linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of legal text types. When translating legal texts, a very specific situation may arise with respect to the cultural embeddedness of the target text, since memes of different legal cultures may co-exist on its various levels. This is especially the case when the parties involved in legal communication occurring through translation decide to use a third language as a lingua franca, which may lack any direct correlation with the legal culture(s) underlying such communication.

The paper proposes unlocking the potential of translation for foreign language teaching (FLT) by seeking to create synergies with the related discipline of translation science (TS). This aim is in keeping with the guidelines for language teaching provided in the Common European Framework of Languages, which introduced a model of communicative competences including communicative language competences as those which enable a person to act by drawing on specific linguistic means. First, an overview of the changing status of translation in FLT is presented – from its being considered a fundamental teaching method and basic skill in the Grammar-Translation Method, to its being all but outlawed in more recent communicative and task-based approaches, to its final rehabilitation in recent decades. It is then shown that, in the development of FLT, the parallel evolution of TS somehow failed to be acknowledged and, consequently, the opportunity to create valuable synergies between the two disciplines was missed. Following the stance of authors who have advocated the use of translation in FLT, it is argued that translation can effectively supplement the development of the four traditional language skills and, moreover, that some of the insights developed by TS can effectively be integrated into FLT as strategies aimed at enhancing leaners’ cross-cultural communicative competences. To this purpose, selected insights from TS (e.g. the functional approach and the skopos theory, the cultureme model, the theory of memes) are discussed and their potential for creating synergies with FLT are explored. Finally, the paper discusses the omnipresence of different forms of translation and interpreting in contemporary societies and shows that this naturally and logically calls for a systematic inclusion of translation in FLT.

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